


Keep Going

by Masu_Trout



Category: Silent Hill (Video Game Series), Silent Hill 3 - Fandom, Silent Hill 4: The Room
Genre: F/F, Injury Recovery, Intra-Series Crossover, Post-Canon, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2016-10-22
Packaged: 2018-08-24 01:38:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8351284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: Eileen expected that making it out of Silent Hill would hurt. She expected the hospital and the doctors and the (very confused) police. She did not expect a strange woman with a far-too-familiar story to show up looking for her.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [morphogenesis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/morphogenesis/gifts).



> Thank you for the lovely prompts, morphogenesis! I hope you enjoy this!

The first few times Eileen wakes up, she's barely functional. The room swims before her eyes, her arm and her back feel like they're going to shatter from the pain, and everything around her is noise and chaos. Doctors bark order as needles slide into her veins, the world is bright and loud and agonizing, shadows swim before her like Walter's grasping hands—

She's grateful when she passes out. The dark is more peaceful.

-

The next day is better. Her arm is in a cast once again, and someone was kind enough to re-bandage her eye and her back. (There's no blood seeping through the gauze this time, no thick lines of gore streaking across her skin and her dress. She's clean, safe, and if she just keeps repeating it to herself she might start to believe it.) 

There's a part of her that wants nothing more than to scream and cry—just break down completely for a few moments—but they've put her on some _really_ good drugs and so the urge is nothing more than a squirming feeling at the back of her spine.

It's fine. It's manageable. If she's going to freak out, she'd rather do it where strangers can't watch her.

Police officers stream in and out of her room all through the day, trying to catch her at her most lucid. She answers their questions at first, haltingly and leaving out as many of the truly inexplicable pieces as she can— _I don't know, officers, he called himself Walter Sullivan. Maybe it was a copycat? He stabbed me, and then after I got out of the hospital he caught me again somehow. I don't remember much_ —until one of them gets a little _too_ pointed in his questions and she realizes they think Henry might be the culprit.

She feels a little bit bad about trying to punch a police officer. Sort of. Maybe. (Anyway, she's the one who pulled out her IV line in the attempt, so she's probably the one who came out of it the worse. If anything, he should feel sorry for her.)

After that little altercation, a nurse—her new angel, Eileen decides through the haze of pain medication—comes and chases the officers away. There's a few blissful hours of solitude after that; just Eileen and the bed and the half-open window. She'd forgotten how wonderful fresh air feels.

Later that evening, just before closing, Henry stops by. The bouquet he brings with him is lovely, but it's nothing compared to just seeing him alive and whole and well. The doctors promised her he was going to live back when they first wheeled her in (she remembers screaming about it, remembers begging them to help him), but she half-expected he'd be… well, like her. Broken and battered and lying in a hospital bed somewhere. Handcuffed to the stretcher, perhaps, if the cops _really_ didn't believe him.

Eileen never even realized how terrified she was for him until all that tension suddenly rushes from her body. Her friend is alive. The ghosts are gone. South Ashfield Heights is normal once more. Everything is going to be okay.

(She wakes herself up screaming five times that night, dreaming of bloated bodies and ghostly hands and blood welling up from under her skin.)

–

The next morning, when Eileen blinks her way back to reality, there's an ache in the scar on her back and a strange woman sitting in the chair next to her bed.

She looks to be maybe a couple of years younger than Eileen: a high school senior, perhaps, or a college student. Not that she carries herself like one—her posture and her quiet, closed-off expression speak to something much older. Her hair is a mix of brown and dirty blonde, a dye job in need of a touch-up, and pale freckles like specks of dust dot their way across her cheeks. The bags under her eyes are a deep red; they remind Eileen of a fading bruise. 

The stranger is staring off into the distance, a magazine opened and abandoned on her lap. She looks the way Eileen feels.

Eileen opens her mouth, then snaps it shut again without saying anything. This stranger feels far too familiar. Something inside her is whispering _I know her, I remember her_. It's not even close to possible—Eileen's been out of college for a year and a half now, _thank god_ , and it's not as if she's the sort of creeper who makes a habit of loitering around campuses looking for students to pick up—but knowing that doesn't change the feeling crawling down her spine.

“Who are you?” she snaps finally. Her voice is hoarse from the screaming and the lack of water. The words come out harsher than she intended.

The stranger jumps a little in her chair; apparently she didn't expect Eileen to be awake. Still, she only sucks in one startled breath before that aura of control descends back around her—she looks down at Eileen's bed and gives her a small smile. “Hi,” she says, “my name's Cheryl Mason. Most of my friends call me Heather, though.” She pauses for a moment. A bit of her solemn expression gives way to embarrassment as she adds, “And, um, I told the nurses I was your sister, so if they come in here it might help if you go along with that.”

Eileen raises an eyebrow. She really should have seen this one coming. “Look, if you're looking for a quote for a newspaper or something, you can fuck off. I'm not talking to anyone.”

That actually startles a laugh out of—Cheryl? Heather? They're certainly not friends, but Eileen doesn't know why she would have offered her the second name if she wasn't hoping Eileen would use it. It's a surprisingly pleasant sound, young and light; it transforms her from a strange statue into a real, living person. “I'm not a reporter, I promise. Trust me, I know how awful they can be. Only thing worse than police.”

The word _reporter_ coming from the woman's mouth jars something loose from Eileen's memory: a blurry black-and-white photograph in the morning paper, a byline on the evening news, her coworkers gasping and gossiping together over the sordid story. A gruesome little murder mystery, swept aside so (bizarrely) quickly that it barely registered at all.

Until now.

“You're that girl,” Eileen says, “the one who killed her father!” She pulls back until the IVs draw tight against her arm, wishes she'd paid more attention when the nurse was pointing out the call button. Wonders whether it would make a difference even if she did manage to call for help.

Did Walter have an accomplice after all, then? Someone had to move the body, someone had to bury it. Is this woman here to finish what he started?

Eileen doesn't want to die here. She survived far too much to be choked to death in a hospital bed by a woman who looks barely eighteen.

“I didn't—” the woman snaps out, sudden anger distorting her expression. She stops, takes a breath. Her eyes flicker shut and then open again. 

“I would never,” she says, calmly but with an undercurrent of deep _certainty_ running through her tone. It's the voice of someone who's had to answer the same question many, many times; Eileen recognizes it from her own tone during the police interrogations. “I didn't kill my father any more than Henry killed all those people from your apartment.”

 _That_ catches Eileen's attention. “What do you know?” she asks, angry and afraid and hopeful all at once, and then: “What do you want?”

“I know you saw things that no one would believe,” Cheryl-or-Heather answers. “I know you have injuries that the doctors can't explain. I know—or I think, at least—that you went to Silent Hill.”

Eileen's eyes flutter shut at the name of the town, her fingers curling into the bedsheets. It's an entirely involuntary reaction, terror and adrenaline together. 

“You did too,” she realizes. The woman's anger slots together with what Eileen remembers of that year-old news story: a single father found gored to death and wrapped in a bed sheet in his apartment. His daughter, gone missing, only to be found days later in the company of a stranger and covered in blood. “You were there, back then.”

The familiarity makes sense, suddenly. It's more than just remembering her photo; it's _recognition_ , completely inexplicable and no less present for it.

The woman—Heather, Eileen decides, if they're going to be discussing this than she has the right to call her Heather—nods, her mouth pressed in a thin line. “I was born there, a long time ago. My dad got me out. But…”

Eileen remembers waking up in the hospital after that first attack, safe and sound, only to close her eyes and open them to monsters in the halls and a world gone mad. “It came back for him.”

“Yeah,” Heather says. Her hands are balled into white-knuckled fists. Eileen hopes she doesn't try to punch anything—the nurses here are touchy about that. “I had to finish it.”

 _Not so finished that it couldn't come for us_ , Eileen wants to say, but she bites her tongue just in time. Not this near-stranger's fault that she couldn't protect people she didn't even know existed, couldn't stop a murder spree that had been decades in the making.

“What do you want?” she asks again instead.

At that, Heather gives her a small, shaky smile. “I want to know what happened—how you got trapped, what you saw, how you got out. I want to do whatever I can to make sure it doesn't happen again. And”—the look in her eyes is knowing and far too old for her face—“I want to help you, if I can. It's… tough, after.”

“If you can convince the police it wasn't Henry, that would be a start.”

“Sucks, doesn't it?” Heather laughs drily. “I—we're working on it. If this is anything like when it happened to me, they're mostly going after him because they don't know what the hell else to do. I doubt they have any solid evidence.”

Eileen thinks back to the things Walter left behind for them: a dirty doll, an umbilical cord, a corpse-filled closet too big for the space it occupied. Rivers and rivers of blood and fresh viscera. It painted _some_ kind of picture, but not one any sane person would want to look at too hard. She wonders how much of it the police have found, what the fuck they're making of it all. Probably they don't have _murderous ghosts_ on their suspect list just yet.

“Who's _we_?” Eileen asks.

Heather shrugs. “Me, obviously. A… family member of mine, I guess—he's a private detective, he's good at dealing with this sort of thing. And an old friend of my dad's who's ex-police.” She frowns down at the magazine in her lap. “I don't really know her well, but she was in there with my dad back then, so… she helps.”

Eileen nods. It makes sense enough to her—you go through hell, you can't help but come out with a little bit of kinship for anyone else who knows what it's like. It's the same reasoning that has her trusting this person she barely knows with a surety and intensity that would surprise her under any other situation.

They're not _strangers_ , not really. Not when they both know what the inside of a living nightmare looks like.

“I was hoping you'd say you had a team of lawyers or something,” Eileen admits. Three people is better than none, but that's not exactly saying much. (It also leaves her wondering just how many people have wandered into Silent Hill, how many among them survived. She's not sure she wants to know the answer to that.)

“I _wish_ I could say that, trust me.” Heather laughs. “Would make my life a whole lot better.”

Eileen yawns suddenly, surprising herself, and the room swims in front of her as she does. “Oh. _Oh._ ” She blinks, unsteadily, but the strange floating feeling doesn't go away.

For a moment, her heart pounds in panic. Is she passing out again? Where will she wake up this time?

“...And that's probably the drugs kicking in.” Heather's voice cuts through the terror; it's an anchor for Eileen to focus on, a solid point in a world that feels increasingly unreal. “Go to sleep, okay? I'll be here when you wake up.”

“Drugs?” she manages. 

Heather nods, or at least the floating blob of gold-and-brown-and-peach that represents her bobs up and down a little. “Yeah. I checked your chart, they've got you on some hardcore stuff. You really took a beating back there.”

“Mm,” Eileen agrees. She remembers that beating. It wasn't pleasant.

A sudden thought occurs to her, flashing across her drowsy mind like a bolt of lightning. “Heather,” she manages to force out.

“Yeah?” Her voice sounds distant, but Eileen can still focus on it.

“My scar—the scar.”

“The one on your back?”

Eileen nods, or at least she tries to. “Is it… going to fade?”

The doctors all promised her it would—soon it would go pale and pink and healthy, they said, and before long she'd never even know it had been there at all. She doesn't quite believe them, though; the mark feels solid, _permanent_ , and it aches likes no other hurt she's ever had before. 

“I'm no expert,” Heather says, a touch hesitantly. 

“But?” Eileen asks, because if there ever was a sentence with a _but_ implied at the end, it was that one.

“But from what I know about Silent Hill… probably not,” she admits. “I think there's something weird and occult-y going on there.” She pauses for a moment, and then adds: “If it's any consolation, it's going to make a really badass scar.”

“Goddamn ghost magic,” Eileen sighs. She doesn't quite feel scared or disappointed—it's more a confirmation of what she already knew than any real revelation. Their apartments were haunted, she and Henry fought an undead serial killer, there's a magic number scarred into her back. Life as usual. 

God. She wonders if anything will ever be able to surprise her again.

Question answered, Eileen lets her head drop to her pillow and her eyes flutter closed. 

There's no need to fear this time around—Heather promised she'd be here when Eileen woke up. Nothing can get to her so long as another survivor is standing guard.

Eileen doesn't dream at all.

–

True to her word, when Eileen wakes up the first thing she sees is Heather's face. She presses a cup of water and a plate of oatmeal into her lap without so much as a _hello_.

“The nurses said I could only stay if I promised to make you eat.” Heather scowls. “So… food. Tah-dah.”

On waking, she's half-surprised Heather actually kept the promise. It seemed like the sort of thing one might say to comfort an obviously-exhausted person, not the sort of thing someone might actually do. But the bags under her eyes and the awkward way she holds her neck speak to a night spent sleeping in a flimsy plastic chair. 

It also pretty easily explains the unhappiness in Heather's voice. Eileen takes the oatmeal and the water without complaint, trying not to feel guilty.

“You… don't have to stay, you know.” She digs her spoon into her food, not looking at Heather's face. “I really am all right.”

She's an adult, after all. She's lived on her own for years now. Sooner or later she's going to have to figure out how to deal with the nightmares without relying on someone to act as an emotional bodyguard.

“Huh?” Heather twists in her chair to look at Eileen. “Oh, no, I don't mind. Don't worry. It's not you.” Her eyes flick toward the door, like she's half-expecting something to burst through it at any moment. “I just… really don't like nurses.”

Realization hits. “You saw the demon nurses too?”

“ _God,_ yes,” Heather says. “One of them shot me in the leg and it left the weirdest scar. I can't wear shorts without someone asking me about it.” The words come out in a rush, like she's half-scared to say them. It makes some sense, Eileen supposes; she probably doesn't get to discuss this sort of thing honestly very often.

Come to think of it, that's probably going to be Eileen's future too: making up halfway-plausible excuses for every new scar she's got carved into her body, hoping nobody questions it too thoroughly. For one, she gets the feeling she's never getting full sight back in her right eye—everything looks blurry through it, even now. 

That's going to be a fun one to explain.

“Huh,” Eileen says, “I guess Henry and I got lucky. I don't think we saw any nurses with guns—just lengths of pipe.”

“Well, you probably didn't have the same nurses. It's a bit different each time, Douglas thinks. Literally everyone we know has seen nurses there, though, so…” Heather shudders. “I think nurses are just _really creepy_.”

That's probably a bit unfair to nurses, but Eileen thinks back to the twisted bleeding things that chased her through the corridors of that nightmare and finds she doesn't have it in her to disagree.

The talk drifts after that, segueing from Silent Hill info to chatter about normal topics and back with an ease that's almost disturbing. Eileen never would have considered herself a woman who could discuss the best local coffee shops and the best weapons for beating human-sized creatures to death in the same breath. 

(She also never would have considered herself the sort of woman who could survive everything she's been through. Sometimes it feels good to be wrong.)

She learns that swords are a surprisingly decent close-range weapon, that mauls are almost impossibly unwieldy no matter how powerful they might be, and that her first instincts were right—Heather's a freshman-going-on-sophomore at a college about two hours away. She's studying forensics, which is a far better choice than Eileen's useless major, and the enthusiasm and passion in her voice when she talks about it is oddly inspiring. No one's ever made Eileen blush talking about decay rates before, but Heather somehow manages it. 

It's… a bit disorienting, not because Eileen doesn't know exactly what she's feeling but because now is _not the time_. Nor the place or the circumstance, for that matter. 

She's sure that somewhere, at some point in history, someone picked a worse time for a crush than her, but she's not sure who they might be or how they might have done it. Maybe some poor bastard fell in love within Silent Hill itself, just went off into the darkness hand-in-hand with one of the town's monsters—that's about the only worse scenario she can imagine.

(It's not a particularly funny idea, but it gets a wry little short out of her anyway and earns her an odd look from Heather in the process. This whole thing's done nothing for her godawful sense of humor.)

Heather stays with her through the day, laughing and talking and clamming up only when the nurses or the police come back in to look over Eileen. It's… comforting. Reassuring. _Really_ endearing.

She's not quite sure why Heather's decided to stay by her like this—chasing off the worst of the questions with a sharp glare, bringing her water whenever her throat dries out, hovering by her bed whenever she drifts close to sleep—but it's beyond anything Eileen could have expected. Surely Heather has other, more important things to do (at the very least, she probably wants a shower and some food of her own), but if she wants to leave she shows no sign of it. If anything, it's the opposite; she all but snarls at anyone who dares suggest that she should leave the room.

 _It's like having a guard dog_ , Eileen thinks, which prompts her to ask Heather whether her nightmare hell-town was filled with dogs too.

(Turns out it was. Hers lacked the mange and freakish tongues that had disgusted Eileen so badly, but as a tradeoff their heads were bisected perfectly down the middle like some sort of weird anatomical chart. She's not sure which is worse.)

\--

Henry shows up again later that evening with a portly, salt-and-pepper-haired man in tow who Heather promptly confirms to be _Douglas!_

Eileen's struck by a mild pang of jealousy as she watches Heather throw her arms around the newcomer. The two aren't related by blood, from what Heather's said, but it's clear the love between them is no less for it. She never had half as good a relationship with her own parents.

Heather finally slips out once she's finished hugging Douglas, a promise to _come back soon_. The room feels a little strange without her—by now, her voice seems almost as much a part of it as the wallpaper and the bed—but Eileen quickly grows used to the change in company. 

Henry is his usual self, quiet and a bit odd but no less patient and kind for it. His presence, his company, his _safety_ : all of it is a quiet comfort to her even still. There will probably never be a time when seeing him alive doesn't send a shiver of relief down her spine.

Douglas is… nerve-racking, at first. He's got a deep, raspy voice, like he sucked down an entire chimney's worth of smoke, and his eyes are sharply perceptive in a way that makes her feel like a butterfly pinned to glass. He's friendly though, funny and self-deprecating and surprisingly warm, and whatever he sees in her he seems not to disapprove of. 

(The first thing he tells her, when they have a quiet moment just to the two of them, is that he'll do whatever it takes to keep Henry out of jail. That alone wins him her favor a thousand times over.)

Somehow, it becomes a routine: Eileen wakes up to Heather watching over her. They eat the terrible hospital breakfast together, rubber eggs or cardboard pancakes or oatmeal glue. After that, they talk; their conversation slips between the normal and the horrifying with a strange ease that Eileen can hardly believe she's a part of. One moment they'll be discussing whatever ridiculous show happens to playing on the hospital television and the next Eileen will be confessing to helping Henry beat a flock of moth monsters to death. 

Heather leaves rarely, and only when she knows Eileen won't be alone; Henry and Douglas come by like clockwork to give her time to slip away. (It's both embarrassing and comforting to know she's being watched over so thoroughly.) Even Heather's third ally shows up once, though from what Eileen understands it took her nearly a full day of driving to do so.

 _That_ is an awkward meeting. Cybil is not rude or cruel or anything of the sort, but Eileen takes one look at her and understands what people mean when they say someone looks _haunted_. Still, she asks the same sort of questions all the police officers did—this time without the judgment and disbelief the rest of them gave her attempts at honesty—and so Eileen does her best not to to notice the vast depths in Cybil's eyes or the far-too-still way she holds her body. 

It doesn't quite work, but perhaps Cybil appreciates the effort.

(Heather gives her a quiet apology as she slips back into Eileen's room afterward; she'd left the moment Cybil showed up with an apology and a half-baked excuse. 

“It's… weird between us,” is her only explanation. “She knew my dad—and she sort of knew me, I guess?—but they had to split after so they'd be harder to track. There's some things she feels guilty about, I guess.” Heather picks at a fraying thread on her shirt. “It's a long story.”

Eileen would like to point out that she's got nothing but time, but she knows Heather well enough by now; _it's a long story_ means _I don't want to talk about it_. She's not cruel enough to press the issue.)

It becomes normal, the hospital. She gets used to hobbling up and down the halls, testing legs carved open by monsters and feet torn to shreds by walking in too-small heels. The doctors are expected nuisances. Henry and Douglas are familiar faces. Heather is a constant companion, by Eileen side every step—literal and metaphorical—of the way.

And that's what makes it so very shocking to her when that routine just suddenly… ends.

The scar on her back hasn't been healing like it should, much to the consternation of her doctors, but the skin's closed over and it's not about to get infected. Her broken arm is coming along nicely, and her eye is blurry still but slowly getting better. The cuts across most of her body have begun to scab over and heal up. She's able to stand, to walk back and forth without wobbling, to hold a conversation without looking for suspicious shadows on the walls.

Six days after she first went in, they discharge her.

It's _terrifying_.

She finds herself standing on the curb next to the hospital, the bouquet Henry brought for her that first day—now dried and preserved—clutched in her good hand. She's wearing an immensely oversized hoodie, courtesy of Douglas, and a pair of sweatpants Heather found for her somewhere. She's pretty sure she looks like someone out of a horror movie or an ad for a domestic violence shelter, but she can't quiet bring herself to care.

Twenty-three years she walked through life without knowing there were fucking _evil ghosts_ in it. Her world seems so much bigger and more nightmarish for the discovery. She's not quite sure what she's going to do. Can she just go back to working in an office building after learning that? Would anyone be able to?

(Well, Henry, probably. Eileen has no idea where he gets his insane resilience from, but she's awfully jealous of it.)

“Hey.” Heather slides up behind her, quiet enough to make her jump. She's got a real careful way of walking; Eileen's grown used to startling at the smallest of noises, but half the time Heather still takes her by surprise. “I got you checked out. Here”—she takes the bouquet from Eileen's hand, replaces it with a bag carrying a toothbrush and toothpaste and a hairbrush—“Douglas is grabbing the car. Henry said he made sure nobody except the police took any of your stuff, so you should still have everything from your apartment.”

“Bet our super tried to throw everything out the moment he realized there was an investigation going on,” Eileen grumbles. (Learning Frank kept a trophy umbilical cord hadn't done anything for her opinion of him.)

She thinks about South Ashfield Heights. Imagines opening her door, walking inside, sinking down into her soft bed. Imagines staring up at the ceiling, knowing that less than a week ago it had been dripping blood.

“God,” she says, and then, softer: “ _God_. I do not want to go back to my apartment.”

She should have started searching a while back. It was more fun to talk to Heather, though, more fun to forget her life had just imploded around her in spectacular fashion.

“Well.” Heather stops. Her face is scrunched up a little and she's very carefully not looking in Eileen's direction. Under the fine dusting of freckles and the layers of small, patchy scars, her cheeks look a touch pink. “If you wanted to… I've got extra space where I'm staying.”

Eileen doesn't say anything. She blinks twice, hard, half-hoping the world might resolve itself into something that makes a little more sense. (All it does is make her right eye hurt.) 

She'd sort of expected… well, she sort of expected that Heather would be _done_ with her. Even if she were the single most fascinating person in all the world, which she knows she's not, there has to be more interesting things in life than playing watchdog to a hospital-bound woman for a solid week. Shared experiences only go so far—Eileen hasn't talked to any of her college classmates since she graduated, and she spent four years with them.

(It's different. She knows it's completely different. But still, some part of her wants to blurt out, _I'm really not that interesting._ Like she's tricking Heather into caring, forcing her to feel pity for her.)

Heather apparently takes her dumbstruck silence for something else, because she quickly adds, “I mean, you don't _have_ to. I get it if you want to go home. And it's just a crappy hotel room, and it would only be until I have to go back to school anyway—”

“No,” Eileen says. On a sudden, ridiculous whim, she slides the handles of the back up onto her wrist and reaches out to grab Heather's hand. The callouses there rub against her fingers. “I'd like that. I mean, if it's okay with you.” She pauses. “And if Douglas doesn't mind.”

 _God_ , she thinks. Douglas is a detective. He's probably realized by now that Eileen's interest in Heather goes beyond gratitude. She's not sure what she'll do if he disapproves of her spending more time around his—daughter? Friend? Ward? 

…She should probably figure out the exact relationship there if she's going to be staying with Heather.

Heather's definitely gone pink now; it's all the way up to her ears. Eileen kind of wants to press her hand against Heather's cheeks to see if they're as warm as they look, but Heather hasn't let go of her hand yet and she doesn't want to be the one to break that connection.

“Douglas is staying in a different room,” Heather says. “And I already told him I would ask you—he's fine with it.” She scowls a bit then. “He knows I can take care of myself.”

“Okay,” Eileen says. A moment later she adds, “thank you.” It seems too small a phrase to encompass everything she's feeling: relief at not having to go back, nervous joy at the feeling of Heather's hand in hers, an undercurrent of fear that she might ruin this all somehow. 

Mostly, though, what she's feeling is relieved. It's only starting to sink in that she really, truly survived; the hospital was its own little bubble of safety, one she could be pulled from and thrown back into a nightmare at any time. 

She's out now, though, and the world is strange and new and terrifying but it's _real_. She has time to work things out, now, and she has people to work them out with.

“Come on,” Heather says. She tugs at Eileen's hand lightly, mindful of the scabbing skin there. “I think I see Douglas pulling up.”

Eileen twines her fingers in Heather's, lets herself be tugged off the curb and away from the hospital, towards the waiting car. 

Time to head somewhere new.


End file.
